


Graft

by arboreal_overlords



Series: Dance Card Multiverse [2]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Danny Stoker is Trying His Best, Final Girl Martin Blackwood, Gen, Hilltop Road Alternative Universe, Implied/Referenced Character Death for everyone in the OG Timeline who isn't Martin, M/M, Martim Pre-relationship if you squint, Past Jonmartin, Post-Canon, The continued adventures of Tim's driving anxiety, Tim Stoker Completes a Redemption Arc He Didn't Technically Start, the continued adventures of Tim's unreliable narration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:55:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28408095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arboreal_overlords/pseuds/arboreal_overlords
Summary: In September 2020, Tim gets a call from his brother, breaks into the Royal Opera House, and meets someone who looks at him as if he were a ghost. Apparently, this is not the darkest timeline. Tim is, in any timeline, bad at letting things go.Or: two guys in the Hilltop Road Alternate Reality, chilling five feet apart because one of them is extremely traumatized
Relationships: Danny Stoker & Tim Stoker, Martin Blackwood & Tim Stoker, Martin Blackwood/Tim Stoker
Series: Dance Card Multiverse [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2080608
Comments: 26
Kudos: 82





	Graft

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to the post-canon sequel to Stomach Bugs that has been haunting me for like six months! You technically don’t have to have read Stomach Bugs in order to understand this fic, but some things (like Tim’s family backstory and some S1-Martim shenanigans) from SB are gestured at here. 
> 
> This fic has been unofficially titled both “Final Girl Martin Blackwood” and “Tim Stoker Completes a Redemption Arc He Didn’t Technically Start.” It takes place in the post-canon Hilltop Road universe and assumes that, in the final showdown, Jon is able to get Martin through the Web link between the realities and then seals it, either dying or becoming King of the Apocalypse until the fear runs out in the OG!reality. I did not come up with this theory/ending! I don’t remember the original post[s] that discuss this but I’m happy to link them! 
> 
> Content warning for Martin’s general trauma and some self-destructive behavior, descriptions of a car crash.

Tim had fallen asleep surrounded by the proofs of Hachette’s newest crypto-historical thriller. When his mobile rang at three AM, Tim’s subsequent thrashing resulted in two nasty paper cuts and a foul mood. He groped around the piles of paper for the mobile with one hand while holding the sluggishly bleeding thumb of the other to his mouth. He squinted at the ID on the lit screen, groaned, and held the phone to his ear.“Something better be on fire.”

It was Danny, obviously, since Tim wasn’t picking up a three AM call from anyone else. “I need you to come get me,” his brother said, his voice tinny and unstable through the phone. He sounded on the verge of tears. Tim didn’t think he’d ever heard Danny cry, not even at their parent’s funerals.

“What?” Tim said, even as he was rolling out of bed and pulling on random pieces of clothing from his bedroom floor one-handed. “Where the hell are you? What’s going on?”

“It’s the Royal Opera House,” Danny said, and Tim could hear a weird echo through the other end of the phone, like Danny was in an empty auditorium. “I’m in the Covent Garden ruins— something’s happening, and this guy is here, I don’t know what he— what are you _doing_?”

There was a distant rumbling noise and a tinny yell at the other end of the phone. Tim mashed it closer to his ear. “Danny? Danny, what happened?”

* * *

Tim and Danny mostly communicated through the low-stakes channels of sending each other memes and occasionally phoning while walking home from the pub. Danny was always caught up in his newest exploration, and Tim— well. Tim was plugging away in publishing, helping aging pulp authors cultivate a social media brand. He liked it, being the guy in the office with novelty socks and an intricate knowledge of departmental gossip. Danny could have enough adventures for the two of them.

But _not_ , Tim thought tensely as he attempted a right side lane change that nearly got him sideswiped by a Tesco van, adventures that required Tim _driving halfway across London_ _at three in the morning_. Tim didn’t really drive anywhere, generally, but when he did he liked to meticulously plot the route beforehand, sometimes using Google street view to scan particularly thorny stretches of road. His kayaking buddy Jeremy used to note that Tim had no problem barreling down rapids on the Sjoa. Tim always pointed out cheerily that the Sjoa was free of Tesco vans or asshole BMWs. Tim liked people, and was good at reading them until people surrounded themselves with several hundred kilograms of steel.

Pulling up to the Royal Opera House was a surreal clash of panicked adrenaline and practical concern: where the hell was he supposed to park? In the end, Tim abandoned his car in front of the marquee near Row Street, trusting that some graveyard shift valet wasn’t about to impound a beat-up Volkswagon.

This did not solve the main issue of how the hell Tim — whose only experience with breaking and entering lately was sneaking back onto his ex’s HBO Go account — was going to find his way into the Royal Opera House catacombs without getting arrested or breaking his neck climbing a wall. Tim craned his neck looking at the dark windows of the enormous stone building, wondering why Danny couldn’t have explored abandoned pumping stations like a normal URB-EXer.

Tim wasted several minutes walking around the perimeter of the building trying to find a service entrance (surely opera people still ordered Postmates like everyone else) before ending up in a dark side-alley that housed the Stage Door.All of the new ground-floor windows were covered in metal spikes, but there were a few recessed squares that were clearly boarded-over old window spaces. Tim tested one of the boarded spaces gingerly with his foot, feeling the wood give slightly under his boot.

He sighed, sending up a plea to whatever higher power was the patron deity of the opera that he was not about to go to prison, and reversed his grip on the enormous metal torch that he had towed with him, using the handle to punch a jagged hole in the wood paneling. This wasn’t greeted by the shrill sound of security alarms, so Tim continued widening the hole in the old wooden paneling until there was a wide enough space for him to slide through. Tim dropped a foot onto an old stone staircase, shaking wood fragments out of his hair. He felt like he had splinters in every square inch of his hands. Tim had only listened to Danny’s impassioned monologues about URB-EX with only one ear, but he was pretty sure this wasn’t how you were supposed to do it.

The staircase led upward to a sturdy door with an electronic lock, which Tim supposed opened into the fancy refurbished section of the building that he had no interest in. So, Tim headed downwards, passing a few musty utility closets and a furnace room. He probably would have tripped around the basement for a while had he not turned a corner and caught the distinct scent of smoke from down one of the corridors. Tim was suddenly glad for the face mask he had automatically donned while leaving his flat.

The corridor ended with a closet door smaller than the others, closed only with a single metal latch and a warning sign that Tim discarded, wrenching it open. There was a sharp step down and a second staircase, this time a metal spiral stairway that disappeared down into the darkness.

“Who _designed_ this place,” Tim muttered, and angled his flashlight down the staircase, grabbing the rusted side of the stairway and gingerly descending downward.

The staircase was shorter than he expected, landing on a dirty stone floor. The rest of the chamber was pitch black, and the smoke was thicker down here, sharp with the alarming smell of motor oil. Maybe there had been some kind of gas main explosion? Angling the torch, Tim could see the familiar outline of his little brother leaning against the far wall, his hands braced on his knees. He was covered in dark dust but looked like he was otherwise in one piece.

“Danny?” Tim asked, drawing closer and swiping at the air in an attempt to disperse some of the smoke. “Are you are right? Why aren’t you wearing a mask? For the record, I _hate_ urban exploration.”

Danny started laughing, which turned into a choking cough. “I lost it,” he said raspily, grabbing onto the side of Tim’s jacket. “Tim, there was a _clown_.” So Danny had clearly inhaled way too much smoke.

The misshapen shadow at the other end of the corridor sharpened into the figure of a man carrying a large duffle bag over his shoulder. “This area, is — ah— closed!” he called in a nervous, northern-ish voice. He didn’t really sound like the kind of person who blew up historical buildings or threatened urban explorers, but what the hell did Tim know.

“Hey, pal,” Tim called aggressively, adjusting his grip on the torch again in preparing to use it if he had to. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? You could have gotten someone killed.”

“Oh, God,” the man said faintly, in a totally different tone of voice, and the flashlight wobbled in his hand, briefly streaking across Tim’s field of vision and blinding him. “ _Tim_?”

“In the flesh,” Tim said automatically, caught on the expression of shock and agony on the other man’s face, like Tim was some sort of revelation. “Sorry— have we met?”

Tim was good with names, and even better with faces. They had definitely never met. This guy was bulky, dressed in dusty jeans, flannel, and a shearling jacket that was worn and stained by alarming substances. He looked like some weird combination of Paul Bunyan and the Final Girl in a horror movie. No one had ever looked this ruined by just staring at Tim’s face, and Tim had a healthy ego.

“No,” the man said, obviously lying. “No,technically we have not met before.”

* * *

Getting out of the Covent Garden Theatre ruins was a whole production, especially since Danny was still worryingly quiet, hovering at Tim’s elbow like the silent shadow he had never been in the whole of their childhood.

Creepy Guy was rushing them through a series of abandoned corridors that Tim was pretty sure he hadn’t arrived through. “What do you mean that you _came in through the front_?” he hissed at Tim when Tim asked about this new route. He shouldered open a dusty door that led into what looked like an old section of the Covent Garden tube station, which, yes, made a lot more sense than knocking down a boarded-over window recess right near one of the busiest roads in central London.

Tim hoped, fervently, that he wasn’t about to be caught on CCTV and charged with domestic terrorism.

He must have muttered something in that vein out loud because Creepy Guy turned around and looked at him. “Tim, I only blew up, like, fifteen square feet of an abandoned catacomb,” he said scornfully, which is exactly what a white guy would say while toting a beat-up duffle bag of C4 within spitting distance of a historical monument.Tim hoped that someone hot and sympathetic played him in the ITV dramatization of this case.

“Why does he think he saw a clown?” Tim asked, changing tactics. Creepy Guy ignored him, staring down at what looked like an old map in his hand.

“Hey _asshole_ ,” Tim began belligerently, and the guy held up a hand.

“One second,” he snapped. “I’m trying to get us out of here. And it’s Martin.”

“Fine. Martin. Why does my brother think he saw a clown?”

“Probably,” Martin huffed grudgingly, beckoning them down a corridor of rusted tile walls and towards a staircase, “because he saw a clown. Well, a ghost of a clown.”

“What?”

“Look, it’s a really, really long story,” Martin said. “Just— trust me— this is all going to go a lot easier if we can have this conversation somewhere else?”

“And why should I trust you?”

Martin sighed. “When you were thirteen,” he rattled off mechanically, “you wrote all of your best friend’s essays for them because you were afraid they were going to be held back and you’d have to do Form 3 without them.”

Tim froze. “That’s impossible,” he said slowly. “Fuck off, I’ve never told—“

“—anyone, yes, that was the point,” Martin finished impatiently. “You told me that when we were stuck in Michael’s— ah — look, there was a period of time where we were worried about things stealing our faces, and I wanted to establish a code. So, you’re welcome for that, by the way, since you gave me a lot of grief in the moment for suggesting it.”

This was all more or less nonsense to Tim, who had no idea who Michael was or why he would mock what was clearly an excellent contingency plan. “So what did you tell me?” He asked as they continued their trek up the tube stairs.

“What?”

“As part of the code,” Tim pressed. “What did you tell me that no one else knew?”

“I mean, does it matter?” Martin asked, turning to frown at him. “You won’t remember it.”

“Yeah, but why is that?” For some reason, Tim decided that he needed to know what was going on now, before they exited into the night and Tim was left with a traumatized younger brother and a lot of questions about quantum mechanics. “Is this some sort of _Back to the Future_ bullshit?”

“Okay, look,” Martin said, stopping in the middle of the stairwell. Danny bumped into Tim’s shoulder from behind when Tim stopped short as well.“I’m not from the future, or the past. This is — I’m from another version of this reality. I knew a different version of you before I got moved sideways, or however you want to do that—” he wiggled his fingers tiredly— “weird universe geometry.” 

Tim gestured around in a sweep that was supposed to take in the crumbling walls of the abandoned tube station, the global pandemic, Boris Johnson, and the current state of carbon emissions.“You’re from an alternate reality, and you chose this one?”

“I didn’t _choose it_ —“ Martin began tensely, as if this were a point of contention, before stopping himself. “Yeah, this is actually the better one, if you can believe that.”

“Well,” Tim said feelingly. “Fuck.”

* * *

Tim invited Martin back to his flat after that, since he still had ten thousand questions and probably owed the guy a larger favor than a couch for saving Danny’s life. Martin made some token protests about a motel that Tim waved off as he bundled Danny into the passenger side of the Volkswagen. “It’s fine,” he said. “I have a million more questions, and since you know this alternate version of me, you know I’m not an axe murderer.”

Martin made a quiet sound, something between a cough and a choked laugh.

Tim turned to look at him through the overhead mirror. “Wait, _was I_ an axe murderer?”

“No!” Martin said, deflating further in the backseat. “Not— it was just a turn of— you were a good guy.”

“Alright,” Tim said, focusing his attention back on the empty road ahead of him. “Keep your secrets.” He tried to catch Danny’s eye in the passenger seat, but Danny was uncharacteristically zoned out, his head tilted against the window and his eyes vacant.

“Danny,” he said, nudging his arm with the hand not wrapped in a death grip around the wheel. “You okay?”

Danny nodded absently, patting Tim’s hands with the tips of his fingers.

“He’s okay,” Martin said from the backseat. “Well, I mean, he’s probably in shock, but he didn’t— get got.”

That was probably supposed to be comforting , and so Tim chose to take it as an affirmation, vague as it was.

“I didn’t think you drove,” Martin added suddenly, and that more than anything made Tim shudder with the feeling of someone casually dipping two fingers into his brain. Who the hell _was_ this guy?

“I don’t,” he snapped, faltering on a right turn and glaring at the sedan that honked behind him, high beams flashing angrily in his side mirrors. “I don’t like it, I just kept the car.”

* * *

Tim’s apartment was large but plain; he’d chosen storage space over interior design. The walls and floor were shades of nondescript oatmeal, the windows too narrow for much natural light.Half the things in his apartment were leftover knickknacks from the house that he and Danny had stumbled through selling eight years ago. There was a whole bookshelf of political science monographs crammed with his mother’s annotations, critical editions on Machiavelli and Arendt that Tim would never use or totally understand.

He and Danny had sorted through the household items together after the accident, carefully preserving their family photos and the most important objects- Dad’s terrible nineties jumpers, the VHS tapes of the four of them goofing off in the Lake District, the sweet love letters between their parents from uni that neither Tim nor Danny ever wanted to read. They’d put some of it in safe boxes in London, and divided the rest between them.Danny had made an awful, guilty expression when he first visited Tim’s flat and realized how much Tim had grabbed at the last minute from the fate of estate sales and charity donations. It wasn’t like Tim was a hoarder, but he’d experienced a surge of irrational panic at anyone picking up on of his mother’s books and seeing her caustic commentary in the margins, the kind of amused knife-edge tone that she only ever used on Tim when he was thirteen and trying to be especially heinous.

Martin didn’t look particularly surprised or curious when he walked into it, the mismatch of young professional IKEA furniture and a side table full of the kind of bottled sailboats only built by nerdy middle-aged dads. Maybe he had been here before; maybe this other reality Tim had rented the same flat. Then again, Martin hadn’t looked particularly surprised at a cave-in and the threat of demonic clowns.

“Sorry, I only have the couch,” Tim said to Martin as Danny stumbled toward the guest room wordlessly.

Martin waved him off. “Trust me, I’ve slept on worse.”

Had he experienced more hours of sleep, Tim would have found that slightly alarming, or would have worried about whatever Martin was carrying through his apocalypse-chic wardrobe. One of Tim’s coworkers had been caught in the middle of a bedbug outbreak in Croydon, and they still shuddered at any contact with upholstered furniture.

However, Tim was operating on three hours of sleep and several existentially volatile revelations ( _multiverse!_ his brain was still screaming in a combination of panic and joy, _confirmed multiverse!_ ) and so he left his couch to its fate and crumpled into bed.

The next morning, Tim nearly hurled his fitness tracker across the room when it gently buzzed against his wrist in lieu of a morning alarm. He briefly wondered, as he got dressed in the dim morning light, if there was another alternate reality in which Tim worked more flexible hours in a world free of widespread pandemic. How many demonic clowns could there really be?

Danny appeared in the doorway of the kitchen, looking like a semi-concussed opossum. Tim took a moment to be very, very glad that he was not dead. “Wherer’you going?”

Tim gestured to his (comparatively) muted cactus-patterned button-up and the gurgling coffee maker. “I’m an essential worker.”

“You work in publishing,” Danny groaned, wheeling back around in the doorway. “There’s nothing essential about that at all.” So he was probably fine.

“Tell that to the corporate overlords at Hachette,” Tim called, pouring coffee into a thermos and letting out a silent breath of relief, trailing his brother into the guest room and closing the door behind him. “Listen,” he said more quietly. “I need you to stay here and keep an eye on this guy.”

“Martin?” Danny asked, collapsing back into bed. “Why? I figured he would probably head out.”

“Danny,” Tim said slowly. “He’s from an alternative universe. We can’t just let him wander around London like a sad post-apocalyptic Paddington.”

Danny laughed begrudgingly into one of his pillows before turning around. “Wait, you seriously believe him?”

Tim blinked. “Um, yeah? He saved you from some kind of ghost clown and then spookily told me information that no one else knows. Are you telling me you don’t?”

“Oh, I definitely do,” Danny said slowly. “But you hate unexplained phenomena stuff.”

“Okay,” Tim said defensively. “First of all, I hate ‘aliens built the pyramids’ documentaries because they’re badly researched and they’re racist. The multiverse is an actual theory of physics, totally different scenario. Second of all, that guy out there _knows me_.”

“What do you want me to do?”

Tim gestured vaguely at the door. “I don’t know, talk to him about the Covent Garden Theater? Ask him about ghost clowns? Just make sure that he doesn’t blow up anything else. Maybe create a plan to spring me from prison if I step outside and get arrested.”

Danny grinned. “Oh, I made that plan years ago.” He hesitated as Tim started towards the door. “Hey, Tim. Thanks. For coming to get me.”

“Yeah,” Tim said, gesturing awkwardly again. “Obviously. I’m serious about that prison plan, by the way. If the CCTVs caught my car we’re screwed.”

“On it,” Danny said, yawning, and then went back to sleep.

Martin was still a gently snoring lump on Tim’s couch as he crept toward the door. Tim peered over at him, just in case his face would look any more familiar in the light of day. Nope.

Tim went to work in his mostly-empty office and finished his edits on that thriller manuscript, trying not to keep one eye on the door for the Met coming to arrest him. He looked up the standard jail sentence for blowing up a small section of a building and read way too much about the Gunpowder Plot of 1606. He put a google alert out on ‘Royal Opera House’ before worrying that MI5 would be able to track him through the alert and then frantically scrubbed his browsing history. It was not one of Tim’s most productive workdays.

Tim could hear Danny and Martin in the building hallway before he even opened the door to the flat. They were having a rollicking conversation, something about spiders. He opened the door and was met with a small ocean of paper. Danny had a sharpie behind each ear and was drawing something that looked like one of the diagrams from Pacific Rim on a large sheet of paper that had formerly been a launch poster for one of Hachette’s events.

“Hi,” Martin said, eyes huge, as if seeing Tim in the light of day in work clothes was a totally new experience from seeing him covered in dust and furious. Maybe it was.

“Long time, no see,” Tim said. “More for you than for me, I guess.”

Martin winced. Danny frowned at Tim, like Tim wasn’t following the correct etiquette for managing a time-traveling acquaintance. “So, no prison then?”

“Not yet,” Tim replied cheerily. He gestured at the small explosion of paper that covered his lounge. “What’s all this?”

“Okay,” Martin said, gesturing to another large piece of paper someone had scotch-taped to the front of Tim’s bookshelf. There was what looked like a crude color wheel with various labeled sections. One of them just said WORMS. “What do you know about a guy named Robert Smirke?”

* * *

Several hours and drinks later, Tim put his head into his hands. “I can’t believe I’m using these words in one sentence,” he said, “but if you’re the only one who crossed the streams—“

“—entered the Web portal through Hilltop Road,” Danny interrupted.

“Yeah, I’m not calling it that. If you’re the only one who made it through, why are there clowns here? I thought the whole point was that our reality doesn’t have these things.”

Martin frowned and pulled a little on his fringe. “So, it wasn’t an exact process. I think they’re like — echoes? That’s why I call them ghosts. I don’t think they’re able to do any serious damage— I don’t know if the Grimaldi that appeared in Covent Garden wouldn’t have been able to kill Danny even if he was right there. But I’ve been trying to track them just to make sure none, you know, fully manifest.”

Danny squinted in concentration at the rough diagram Martin had drawn them. “If you have the original timeline of events, we should be able to plot them by relative distance going forward,” he said. “The Covent Garden manifestation of the Stranger was in 2013 in the other timeline, right? But you knew to go there last night.”

Martin turned to Tim in alarm, but Tim had already recognized Danny’s gimlet-eyed focus before. “No, absolutely not,” Tim said. “URB-EX was bad enough, you’re not becoming a _Ghostbuster_.”

Danny bristled, moving from ‘quietly laid back’ to ‘prickly and defensive’ in a familiar tripwire that Tim still didn’t totally understand after all these years. “You don’t have to say it like that,” he snapped.

Martin was watching the two of them like they were playing a sport that he didn’t understand the rules of.

Tim sighed. “Fine, fine.”

“What?” Martin asked.

“Best let him just run through the obsession now,” Tim said. “Worst case scenario, he’ll bother you for about two months and then take up parkour.”

Danny rolled his eyes and started unrolling a giant driving map of London across Tim’s coffee table.

Martin sighed. “Trust me,” he said. “That’s not the worst-case scenario.”

* * *

In the following weeks, Martin more or less became Tim’s extracurricular activity. Other people had taken up baking bread or redecorating their houses during COVID; Tim was apparently rehabilitating alternate-dimension Ghostbusters. While Tim was at work, Martin and Danny were researching the London map of horror ghosts and how to dispel them, turning his lounge into something between a red-yarn conspiracy theory board and a used bookstore.

Danny hadn’t mentioned returning back to wherever he had been staying in Manchester, and Tim didn’t ask if he was planning on leaving his guest room at any point; it was kind of nice, returning to an inhabited flat at the end of the day instead of cooking dinner with only a podcast for background noise and simulated company. Tim hadn’t realized how lonely he had been, trapped in his flat and his semi-abandoned office without the crowded liminal spaces of pubs or cafes.

“Do you think the pandemic is a horror ghost?” Tim asked casually one morning, perching on one of the benches at his kitchen counter.

Martin hummed. “I thought so at first, but not . . . really? Has anyone started peeling off their skin or setting people on fire yet?”

Tim and Danny stared at him silently. Martin looked up at them. “No?” He asked. “Well, just bad luck and shit public health measures, then.”

Martin did that, moving back and forth between casual quips about the post-apocalyptic world and periods of visibly traumatized silence. His sleep and eating patterns were still concerningly volatile; he’d given Tim a heart attack in the first few days by passing out in the hallway after missing a day and a half worth of meals.

“I’m fine!” He insisted after. “Sorry, I forgot that I needed to.”

“You _forgot that you needed to_?” Tim asked shrilly.

“Tim, stop,” Danny said quietly, hauling Martin up with one arm. “I’m going to go get some Gatorade down at Superdrug.” He looked at Tim from behind Martin’s back, eyes meaningful over the top of his reusable mask, which was Danny’s way of saying ‘ _deal with this_.’ For someone who was universally liked, Danny shied away from confrontation whenever possible. Tim once had to break up with a girl _for_ him in Year 8.

“I’m fine,” Martin repeated. “It’s just an adjustment. I’m not used to time . . . working the same way.”

“Right,” Tim said dryly, pushing him towards the couch. “‘Time working the same way,’ thanks Martin, that clears a lot up.”

Since Martin didn’t seem to be in the mood to share, and getting him drunk was a terrible idea in his state, Tim defaulted to his remaining mode of comforting people. Several minutes later, Martin looked around, bemused, from beneath five different blankets on the couch. “Is this every blanket that you own?”

“Not even close,” Tim said, wedging a throw pillow by Martin’s feet. “I did a lot of weird online shopping in March.” He dragged over an ottoman from the other side of the lounge and grabbed a random folder from his work backpack. “Here, you can listen to the new manuscript I’m editing. It’s awful.”

Martin alternately yawned and grimaced through the first chapter of Tim’s newest plodding, masturbatory thriller. Tim paused in order to scribble things in the margins and cross out phrases with relish.

“Do you like it?” Martin asked suddenly, while Tim was writing a comment with particular acid amusement. “Publishing, I mean?”

Tim paused. “Yeah, I guess,” he said. “Much more before they cleared out the office. I miss people.”

Martin frowned sleepily. “You did this for me before, you know.”

Tim laughed. “What,” he asked, “I tortured you with the absolute worst of my manuscripts?”

“No,” Martin said, yawning. “You stuck around while I was trying to rest. You were keeping an eye out for worms.”

Well, that sounded ominous as hell. “Well, that sounds ominous as hell,” Tim said.

By the time that Danny came back, laden with a neon Superdrug bag, Martin was asleep and Tim had upgraded his couch sentry duty with alcohol. “You weren’t supposed to turn him into a human burrito,” Danny said disapprovingly.

Tim knocked back a vodka soda that was basically vodka. “Oh, don’t worry, we had a great time deconstructing the Gregorian calendar and discussing horror worms.”

Danny made that sad face at him again. It was Tim’s least favorite face. “You can just ask him, you know,” he said. “About his version of you. I asked about me, like, weeks ago.”

Tim waved him away with the hand that was holding the tumbler. “No,” he said confidently. “It’s fine. I’ll just keep all of my questions inside, and then I’ll die.”

* * *

Harboring a traveler from another dimension was actually a lot less hassle than the movies made it look. No vague yet menacing government agencies knocked on Tim’s door or trailed him from a respectable six-foot distance at Sainsbury's. There weren’t any catastrophic consequences of breaking the spacetime continuum or causing a temporal paradox, at least none that Tim noticed. The kinds of places that Martin didn’t have access to— basically, anywhere that required a legal identity— were closed anyway. Martin seemed perfectly content to hang out in Tim’s flat or go on long, meandering walks around London: sometimes with Danny or Tim, sometimes alone. Tim didn’t know what Martin had been doing before their paths crossed underneath the Royal Opera House. It would probably only depress him if he knew.

On one of the rare days that Tim worked from home, Martin had accidentally walked behind Tim’s makeshift desk on the kitchen table on his way to brew tea. Tim didn’t have it in him to be mad, since Martin actually remembering to imbibe things was a promising direction.

“Who is that?” Malorie asked in the middle of their Zoom meeting

“Oh, boyfriend,” Tim said automatically since there wasn’t really a plausible way to pass Martin off as a blood relative.

She laughed. “Stoker, only you could manifest a live-in boyfriend in the middle of a fucking pandemic.”

If Martin had heard, he didn’t say anything.

One Saturday morning, they ended up at the London Zoo. Tim had no idea why; he wasn’t a particular fan of the Zoo, and the weather wasn’t right for it. He and Martin had been walking aimlessly when Martin had suddenly taken the initiative to navigate them at a bruising pace through Regent’s Park. It was drab and raining, and there were only a handful of masked families navigating the outdoor exhibits with determined, miserable cheerfulness.

“I’m always up for some penguins,” Tim said lightly. “There’s one that looks a lot like Danny, they have the same little spiky cowlick at the top of their head.”

Martin didn’t seem interested in the animal exhibits; he spent a long time staring at the carousel near the lemur habitats. It was still running, weirdly enough— Tim supposed that the bobbing horses were large enough to maintain a six-foot barrier between riders. The music was slightly flat and a little shrill.

“What, do you want to go on it or something?” Tim asked. “Not my thing, but I’ll hold your stuff.”

“No,” Martin said, still watching the carousel with intense focus. 

* * *

While Danny was enthralled in research about the multiverse and fear entities, he delegated the more mundane tasks— like finally procuring Martin some form of legal identity— to Tim.

“You’re better at that than I am,” Danny said as he toed on his boots, setting off to take pictures of a potential Buried ghost at Marble Arch.

“Yeah, of course,” Tim said sardonically. “Filling out forms in triplicate. My superpower.”

Danny flinched. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

Tim knew he didn’t mean it like that. It was, in retrospect, an awful thing to say. Danny rushed out the door before Tim could engineer an apology that wouldn’t encompass the last five years.

“This is kind of like _Splash_ ,” Tim mused as he browsed through another stack of papers for Martin Blackwood’s official DOD in this universe. Martin was sitting at the other end of the table, supposedly helping him out while really fiddling with the Telegraph crossword.

“What?”

“You know, that movie where Tom Hanks finds a mermaid and helps her be a person? Except, obviously, for all the death and trauma.”

Tim turned to see Martin staring at him silently. Maybe Martin had never seen Splash. Tim was usually a very good judge of people’s taste in media, and Martin— for all of his post-apocalyptic intensity— seemed like a 90’s romcom fan.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Martin said, looking awful. “You just— remind me of someone.”

“Is it me?” Tim joked.

“Yeah,” Martin said without humor.

There wasn’t much to say to that. Tim re-applied himself to typing in an explanation about how Martin Blackwood was accidentally been reported dead in 2006 and just hadn’t gotten around to correcting official records for several years. Tim was probably breaking several laws in doing this, but it wasn’t like this universe’s Martin Blackwood was putting his social security number to use. He glanced back down at the report that was printed off on his kitchen table. Martin Blackwood had evidently been a middling student before dying in a fire caused by some faulty wiring in a council housing estate. There hadn’t been any pictures of this world’s Martin, though Tim noted with slight surprise that Martin was younger than him, barely over thirty.

“So, how did we become friends?” he finally asked. “Have you been nursing a well-hidden passion for sport or something? I don’t think we would have been at uni at the same time, unless I took several more gap years in the darkest timeline.”

Martin snorted. “Oh, I never went,” he said, with the small smile that came out whenever he seemed to be sharing an inside joke with himself. “We, ah, worked together.”

“Wait, so _I_ was a ghostbuster?” Tim said, intrigued. “Huh. I can’t see it.”

Martin didn’t say anything, but it was one of those silences that seemed particularly loud. Tim wasn’t sure if those moments were Martin trying to protect him from a difficult truth or Martin simply unwilling to open up the soft underbelly of his own universe to Tim’s fascination and amusement. Not for the first time, Tim wondered what this other Tim had been like, how he had gone so astray as to end up a axe-murdering supernatural detective who put that look on Martin’s face.

“You thought I was really boring,” Martin finally offered. “At least, at first.”

“I did _not_ ,” Tim said confidently.

“Oh, you definitely did,” Martin shot back. “Bear in mind, this was like three years and a couple of apocalyptic rituals ago. You thought I was too nice.”

“Really?” Tim asked, grinning. “Missed the boat on that judgment.”

“Like I said.”

They worked a little longer quietly; Tim could hear the clicking keys of his laptop echoing through the otherwise silent room. Martin seemed comfortable with them working side by side, certainly more comfortable than he was with the full force of Tim’s curious scrutiny on him.

“Stop me if I’m wrong, here,” Tim said with false lightness, continuing to type, ”but I’m beginning to think this other version of me was a kind of an asshole.”

Martin snorted. “Well, yeah,” he admitted. “Only at the end, though.”

Tim wasn’t sure if ‘the end’ was the end of the world or simply the end of his own life.

“Technically, you saved the world,” Martin added. He didn’t sound particularly impressed about it.

“Yeah?” Tim asked. Saving the world seemed wildly out of character for him. He had never considered himself a particularly heroic person or a first-responder type. His had a first in anthropology. Anthropologists were, like, the _penultimate_ responders. Tim indexed that joke away in the back of his mind for a conversation that was a fraction less depressing that this one.

Martin smiled bloodlessly back down at his crossword. “ It didn’t stick.”

* * *

After a few weeks, a DNA test and a phone call to the Stoker’s old family solicitor, Martin’s NiN card came in the mail.

“Congratulations,” Tim said, holding it aloft. “You are an official member of the second darkest timeline! In six to eight months you might even be able to use this at a pub.”

Martins sighed and grabbed the card from Tim’s hand, looking understandably torn about his sudden permanence in the world. Danny looked over at him, quietly sympathetic.

“We should celebrate by getting you some new clothes,” Tim said.“Not that you can’t pull off this look, but you probably want something that doesn’t come from the weirder areas of my closet.”

“Everything is closed, Tim,” Danny said from the couch. Danny seemed to worry that Tim had just _forgotten_ about the general pandemic every few days.

“Tim, you own a pair of booty shorts with ‘essential worker’ printed across the bum,” Martin added. “I’m not taking any more fashion guidance from you.”

“Hey, those were for a mutual aid fundraiser,” Tim protested. “Also, they look great on me.”

Martin was currently wearing an oversized t-shirt that Tim had bought Danny during his marine biology phase and then stolen back. It was bright red and had ‘I do not control the speed at which lobsters die’ emblazoned across the front. It was the only piece of clothing Tim owned that would fit Martin after Tim binned his blood-encrusted flannel and jeans with extreme prejudice, but it probably wasn’t really in Martin’s fashion wheelhouse. Tim had tried to dispose of the shearling jacket too, but Martin had thrown a fit; it was apparently some sort of gift. 

Martin still let out little clues like that, reactions that Tim couldn’t quite clock: Martin’s dislike of anything small and quick (Tim didn’t make him take the Tube, which would have been a rat-adjacent nightmare), and his avoidance of videocameras. Tim supposed that the apocalypse might leave you will all kinds of unusual PTSD triggers.

Two days ago, Martin had drifted out of a conversation with Tim and Danny, staring at the coffee mug that Danny had clutched between his hands. Their dad had given it to their mother as an anniversary gag gift years ago; it was another one of the little things Tim had salvaged after it was packed up for donation. It was blue, chipped, and had ‘HAVE YOU DATED AN ACADEMIC? YOU MAY BE ELIGIBLE FOR FINANCIAL COMPENSATION’ printed across the side. Their mother had laughed so hard she had cried.

* * *

Tim considered himself the kind of person who invited confidences. It wasn’t necessarily a skill; Tim wasn’t really even a good listener. People just ended up telling him things. Back at Trinity, there was a term where classmates came out to him on a weekly basis. Tim always figured that it was a question of approachability; he was the unthreatening class clown who could keep his mouth shut about other people’s information, if not his own.

It was always a helpful social barometer for Tim; if his friends (or total strangers) were unloading about their impending breakups or professional difficulties, it didn’t mean that Tim was being _too much_. Plus, Tim liked hearing these stories. A shared secret was like a small pact of friendship.

A therapist had once told him that information and emotional intimacy were not the same thing: it was one of their last sessions before Tim stopped going, deciding that he had been Perceived enough for several years.

Anyway, this was all to say that Martin _wouldn’t talk to him_ , and it was driving Tim a little crazy.

It was a particularly bad afternoon— Martin had clearly not slept the night before, and was burrowed in several blankets and an aura of irritated grief— when Tim made the decision to tackle the problem head on. Martin had that particular look that Tim had privately nicknamed ‘ _Samwise Gamgee Alone At the Top of Mount Doom_.’

“So, Danny and I don’t get along like we used to,” Tim began, trying to start from an angle that wouldn’t immediately put Martin’s back up.

Martin looked over at him, slightly confused.“Yeah, I do feel a bit like you’re sharing custody of me,” he said.

“You know how our parents died,” Tim said, remembering Martin’s offhand comment to him that first night. _I didn’t think you drove_.

“Yes,” Martin replied cautiously.

“It was, to put it generously, a huge fucking mess,” Tim said bitterly. “They didn’t have a will, or leave us any instructions about what to do with everything. There was the house, and their other car, and all of their accounts, even before all of the insurance stuff surrounding the accident. I hadn’t realized death involved so much paperwork.” 

Martin nodded grimly. Tim wondered if he’d ever had to settle someone’s estate while planning a funeral before the apocalypse rendered all of that pointless. He wondered if Martin had settled _his_ estate.

“Anyway,” he continued, shelving that incredibly disturbing thought, “I had just finished at Trinity and had started a job at Random House. Danny had to come back from a gap year project helping shoot a wildfire documentary in Australia.Some of Dad’s friends offered to lend a hand with the financial stuff, and we had the family lawyer, but the work mostly fell on us. Danny just wanted it all over with, but _I_ —“ his tone hardened in mocking self-loathing “— I wanted to do everything _properly_. It all seemed so important like I needed to prove I was a good son.”

Tim took a deep breath. “I was angry— really angry. I felt like I didn’t have anyone that was reacting the same way I was. I thought it was some kind of betrayal.”

Martin stared at him, looking horrified. Tim wondered if he’d already told him this story. Probably not, from the look on his face.

“Anyway,” Tim added, trying to lighten his tone. “There’s a reason I was telling you all this. I guess what I meant is that you’re probably experiencing that on, like, a cosmic scale because you lived through the end of the world and all of us are just — I mean everything still sucks, but we’re all _fine_.” 

Martin sighed. “Well, yeah. When we were making our way through the— I dunno, the apocalypse word--“ and this was the first time Martin had referred, however unconsciously, to someone who had been there with him— “there were still people there, suffering under all of the different powers. I couldn’t help them, but I tried not to ignore them. It got hard after a while. It’s nice to see other people, now, doing normal things.”

Tim toasted him with his coffee cup. “Well, I suspect that you’ve always been a better person than I am.”

“Not really,” Martin said.

After a while, Danny wandered out the guest room, where he had probably taken shelter in a well-meaning attempt to give them some space. His eyes were a little red, but he didn’t otherwise give any sign that he had overheard their conversation. “I’m on dinner tonight, right?” He asked. “I was thinking of making this stuffed peppers dish. It’s Paleo.”

“That’s not a real thing,” Tim said.

“I am going to murder everyone in this flat,” Martin said.

————

Of course, it was right after that, when Tim got nice and complacent, that Martin disappeared.

Tim arrived from work to find Danny alone in the kitchen, glaring at the back of a box of quinoa in suspicion. Tim bit back a joke about the possible existence of quinoa in the Paleolithic era because he was really trying to be better. “Did Martin go out for a walk?” He asked. “I thought he was on dinner tonight.”

Danny looked up from the quinoa, frowning. “He left an hour ago with the car. He said he was picking you up from work.”

Tim’s stomach dropped somewhere in the vicinity of his feet. Danny’s eyes widened. “Shit,” he said. They bolted for the front door at the same time.

“Where was your next —thing?” Tim asked as they thundered down the building stairs.

“It was just some field,” Danny said. “He didn’t say anything about it, I thought we were going tomorrow. It’s the isolation one.”

As it turns out, Danny’s checkered history in semi-professional and liminal ventures comes in handy when it comes to weird favors. Tim isn’t sure if Rodolpho (who owns a lime green Range Rover) is a model friend, an URB-EX friend, or an acquaintance from one of Danny’s weirder hobbies. He asked zero questions about why Danny was asking him to drive at a breakneck speed into the Kentish countryside at six o’clock on a Wednesday, nor did he raise a single pierced eyebrow when Danny asked him to drop them at an empty stretch of road with no visible markings.

“Best of luck, Stoker,” he said as he reversed on the narrow road. Tim resolved to buy him a drink in some pandemic-free unspecified future.

“The field is right up here,” Danny said, pulling out his mobile again. “We were supposed to go on foot.”

The sun is finally starting to set, and it’s rained recently enough that the ground under the brush is squelchy, but this is at least far more Tim’s terrain than an opera catacomb. The wind whipped the hood of his jacket against his head, and Tim hoped that Martin brought along that awful jacket. Whoever gave it to him, Tim thought, was probably a lot better at managing all this than Tim was.

Tim had several heart attacks in swift succession when they hiked over the final hill (next to a graveyard, which later Tim would find a little cliche for this horror ghost) and saw Tim’s Volkswagon crumpled against an elm tree, the bonnet still gently smoking. The driver’s side door was open, though, and Martin was standing on the other side of the road.

The field was a little foggy, but there wasn’t otherwise any manifestations of clowns or monsters or whatever showed up for the Isolation cut of the horror pie. Martin looked distant and miserable, but no more so than a normal guy who had wrapped his car around a tree on a semi-abandoned roadway with no cell service.

“Sorry,” he said, his tone flatter than normal as it carried towards them across the field. “I forgot that cars don’t mix well with the Lonely.”

Tim stalked down through the graveyard, faintly aware of the slight numbing effect of the fog around them. He wondered if it would help at all with his instinct to start off a blazing row. Martin didn’t look like he was going to rise to any kind of debate, but Tim could shout enough for the two of them.

“What,” he said as evenly as he could, “were you _thinking_?”

Martin sighed. The fog seemed to roll out of his mouth, mingling with the viscous mix in the air. “The Lonely used to be my— for lack of a better word— territory,” he said. “I was curious. I wanted to see if it would still work.” As he spoke some of the color seemed to come back to his face. “I really am sorry about the car,” he added more earnestly. “I know that was probably . . . upsetting.”

“Gosh, can’t imagine why,” Tim said. Danny elbowed him in the side.

“Martin, you’re the one who insisted on the buddy system,” Danny added more gently. “It seems even more important for stuff like this.”

“Yes, you should have at least taken Danny with you,” Tim snapped, “he’s the one who has, like, a spelunking license and a six pack!”

“ _How is that relevant,_ ” Danny hissed.

Martin laughed, a little hysterically. “You know, if the other Tim found out that I was dragging his brother all over to haunted locations, he would literally kill me.”

“Who cares!” Tim shouted. “He was a massive prick! Fuck him!”

Martin looked suddenly, incandescently, furious. He opened his mouth and Tim knew, with sudden and chilling certainty, what he was going to say. He wondered if it made it better or worse that Tim was clearly not the person that Martin had spent the last few months mourning. After a moment, though, Martin took a deep breath and visibly chose to start over. “Look,” he said. “You shouldn’t be a part of this. You’ve got a job that isn’t a horrible prison, and a brother, and a life— eventually, I’m just going to drag you down a path that you hated to begin with. You _hated_ it, Tim, and it made you hate all of us.”

That answered several questions that Tim had been harboring. Danny looked unsurprised, so Martin had probably already told him.

“Well, I’m choosing it now,” he said. “We’ll just make sure it goes better this time.”

Martin sighed and sat on a nearby tombstone. Tim walked over and sat next to him, still surreptitiously checking for bones that were sticking out or anything. “You know,” he said. “You don’t have to do this either.”

Martin huffed. “Who’s going to, if I don’t?”

“ _So many people_ ,” Danny offered. “I know that you swore me to secrecy and everything, but I could set up a group chat in a half and hour and get takers. Half of what we do is already Urban Exploration stuff.”

“Look, Martin” Tim started as gently as he could. “What do you want?”

Martin laughed bitterly. “For everyone to be happy, forever,” he said. He sounded like he was quoting someone else. “But that’s not going to happen.”

“Okay,” Tim said. “But what in this timeline?”

Martin stood, silent and slumped, for a moment before exhaling a large, shuddering breath. “I want to go find Sasha,” he said, like a dam breaking. “I want to see her, I want _you_ to see her, I feel awful about—“

Tim had no idea who Sasha was, but this seemed like an important step. “Okay,” he said easily. “Let’s go! It’s a road trip.”

The three of them slowly turned to look at Tim’s Volkswagon, which continued to resemble a crumpled tin can. One of the side windows collapsed. Martin winced. Danny let out an inappropriate burst of laughter, clapping a hand to his mouth afterward.

“Quick question,” Tim amended. “Is this a trip we could possibly take the train for?”

**Author's Note:**

> Tim: so it turns out that I push away friends and loved ones when they react to trauma differently than I do
> 
> Martin, unconvincingly: this is brand new information to me 
> 
> For the record, what Martin was about to say in that last scene: a Full Martin Rant in defense of OG!Tim, because Martin is still sorting them as ‘New Tim’ and ‘My Tim’ and gets mad when Tim refuses to extend sympathy for flawed trauma coping mechanisms *even to himself.* 
> 
> What Tim thought he was about to say: “I did.” 
> 
> Anyway, I was really and truly intending for this to be the final part of this series, but I feel so bad for Jon that I might write a third part where the formidable research quartet are able to yank Jon from the OG!Timeline and we can get some Jonmartim shenanigans. Maybe they yank the whole crew, and I can finally manifest my Sasha & Basira friendship agenda


End file.
